


make up something to believe in your heart of hearts

by The_Blonde



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-17 16:16:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16977843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Blonde/pseuds/The_Blonde
Summary: Written forMaeTaurus, who asked for:"A fic based in reality where Dan breaks Phil's heart. Maybe he cheats on Phil or breaks up with him or says something really terrible to him. The saddest fic ever that will make me ugly cry. Happy ending preferred but not required."Because who doesn't love a bit of angst at Christmas?





	make up something to believe in your heart of hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MaeTaurus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaeTaurus/gifts).



> For MaeTaurus: Merry Christmas <3 Thank you for letting me fulfill all my angsty dreams! I hope you like it. 
> 
> Huge thanks and love to my wonderful betas, who will be named when I ~*reveal myself*~, and read this with so much patience and encouragement that I will be forever grateful <3 
> 
> Title from "Mistaken For Strangers" by The National.

When they met for the first time, when Dan was finally a real person and not a collection of pixels on a slowly buffering skype connection, Phil was struck by how much more subdued he was in reality, the slow way that he brought his hand over his eyes like he was shielding himself from whatever brightness Phil was sending in his direction. Phil had instantly tried to tone it down (to tone what down was still a mystery), froze halfway through his hands clasping Dan’s shoulders and stopped the looping chorus of his own voice to say _I’m sorry. It’s just_. Dan raised one eyebrow. _It’s just me_. He wanted to be reassuring _it’s just me, we’ve been talking for months, remember_ , and it had worked, a little, even though Dan spent the entire day into the entire week looking at Phil like he’d caught a sunbeam in a jar and now had absolutely no clue what to do with it. 

He still looks at Phil like that. Phil attempts to add it to the list-of-Dan’s-favourite-things that he’s been cataloguing in his mind for the past ten years. It maybe ranks above expensive sweaters with holes cut out of them but below dogs. The exact expression on his face when Phil glances at him out of the corner of his eye. Phil isn’t naive enough to believe that it’s a you’re-one-of-my-favourite-things expression. It says _I have no clue what to do with you_. 

It’s the look on Dan’s face before he says _I don’t understand why you’re with me_ or some variation on that theme. When Phil is charming the lady who works in the corner shop. When he’s watching Phil from the other side of a room. A sunbeam in a jar. A thing that Dan is scared of mishandling. So bright that it hurts his eyes and burns his fingertips. 

It’s the look on Dan’s face as he looks at Phil, down on one knee with snow soaking through his jeans, right before he says _No, I can’t_. 

One of their Christmas lights (a collection of horribly mismatched sets that Phil had thrown around the balcony) blows its bulb at that exact moment, a loud cracking sound that mirrors the one behind Phil’s ribcage. He says, “What?” because it seems so ridiculous. In his head he was already stood back up, holding the ring box out to Dan and saying the word fiance out loud while Dan smiled back at him. “What?”

“I can’t,” Dan says, not smiling. “We can’t. Phil.”

Phil repeats, “ _What_.” 

“Can you get up?” 

Phil says, “Can I get up?” because, physically, yes, he can. Emotionally, who knows. 

“I don’t know why you did this.”

“Why I did what.” On muscle memory alone Phil has somehow managed to release the ring box from his jeans, is almost halfway through the motion of holding it up. “This? You can’t be surprised, Dan, we -”

Dan, pleadingly, says, “Can you get up? I don’t want to have this talk while you’re kneeling at my feet, Phil, please.”

Phil, reduced to nothing other than repeating random words from things Dan has just said, replies, “This talk?” 

Phil’s relationship experience is short and uneventful, fumbling (in more ways than one) and full of him staring at various people across lecture halls and bars and then looking away when they stared back. His relationship experience is _Dan_ , ten years of all the glorious chaos that it’s been, and they’ve never had a Talk. He never thought that they would. Phil stays where he is, on one knee in inch deep snow, in a desperate attempt to delay it. 

Dan says, “Fine, I’ll come down there,” and sits, legs folded, opposite Phil. “I don’t-”

“You mean, a Talk, don’t you?” Phil does air quotes with his free hand, quotation marks that don’t close. “One of those talks. A where is this going talk. You don’t have those after ten years. At Christmas.” He nearly adds _and you know I love Christmas_ but that somehow feels too cruel, to both him and Dan. “While the other person is proposing to you.”

Even using the word proposing is wrong, that sounds like it actually got started, when in fact it had just been him slowly dropping to one knee and Dan, equally slowly, turning around and letting that expression settle on his face. Disbelief mixed with horror. 

“You don’t want me to propose,” Phil guesses. An understatement that he tries to say lightly, to try and salvage something out of the horribleness of this situation, a series of falling dominoes that Dan has set in motion. “You don’t want to get married. That’s fine.”

The word _fine_ sounds like it’s split right down the middle. Dan says, “That’s not - I mean, that’s part of it, but -”

“You don’t want to be engaged,” Phil guesses again.

“Well, no, the opposite, really, I -”

“You _want_ to be -”

“No, the opposite. The opposite of being engaged.”

“Not being engaged?”

Dan’s mouth does something complicated, a twist of lips that almost brings out his dimples. It’s odd for Dan, someone from whom words bubble and stream in a current that sometimes seems never-ending (varying in volume depending on his mood), to have him suddenly speechless. To have been made speechless by Phil, and not in a good way.

Phil says, “You’re not explaining what you mean.”

Dan, with some effort, manages, “This is all out of order. How are you not -”

Phil isn’t given to fits of temper, to stamping his feet or raising his voice. He is placid and calm to a fault, a pool you could skim pebbles over the top of without noticing the tangles of reeds and panicking fish underneath. He doesn’t wear his emotions in his shoulders and on his face like Dan does, doesn’t have the same cutting way with words, explosions of emotions that cannot be controlled.

Martyn had helped him pick the ring, even though he’d needed no help, he knew exactly what Dan would like, but it seemed the kind of shopping trip that you should take your brother on so he had. It was silver with a loop of black around the centre of the band, in a black velvet box that had lived in the pocket of Phil’s jeans for weeks, waiting for the right moment when there actually had never been a right moment at all. 

Phil had expected Dan to look at the ring with some kind of joy laced with wonder, an expression that he would want framed. As it is, Dan just watches, wide-eyed, mouth still open on _not_ , as Phil pulls his hand back and sends the box flying off the side of their balcony. 

He also, at some point, pulls down all of their Christmas lights and wordlessly dumps them into Dan’s lap. A mangled mess of wires and half-smashed bulbs that probably resembles what’s left of his heart. Thrown at Dan’s feet as if to say _look what you did_.

***

The AmazingPhil Room, as they’d taken to calling it, was never designed to be slept in. Phil doesn’t know how he’d ever expected that their subscribers would think that he did. There’s no walkway between the walls and the bed itself, he has to half throw himself onto it from the doorway, and there’s a chest of drawers that there’s no possible way of opening pushed right against the bedside. The duvet, having not been used properly for years, still smells a little like the aftershave he used to wear in his mid-twenties.

He kicks the door shut with his foot (there’s enough room to do that in this tiny space, even while lying down, how would anyone have believed this was someone’s actual bedroom), right into Dan’s face as he says, “You don’t have to.”

Dan, muffled through the door, says, “I should be the one sleeping here. You can go upstairs.”

He says, “Actually , I should just go. Do you want me to go?”

He says, “I want to talk to you before I do, though, Phil. We need to talk, properly, we didn’t get the chance before you - I’ll clean up the balcony. The glass and everything.”

Phil flips onto his stomach and yells into his pillow (which doesn’t smell like his aftershave at all. It smells like Dan’s). 

Martyn texts _what’s news little brother?_ with a winking emoji. The same text he’s sent every evening since Phil bought the ring, probably huddled around his phone with Cornelia waiting for a Dan-approved selfie.

Phil would have just taken a photo of his hand instead, or of their shadows. He likes arty angles, things that only he understands. Photos of people’s backs, photos from a distance. Things that someone would miss if they scroll through his camera roll. He used to hand his phone to a lot of people at meet and greets, until there were a few “accidental” swipes off the camera, trying to get to his messages (though they’re always together, any texts are carefully worded and vague. Just in case). Marianne had vetoed the using of actual phones then, always use theirs, try and ignore the backgrounds of photos where you’ve been moved closer together, the ones you wish you’d actually taken, the ones you wish you actually owned. 

He and Dan had got into the habit, somewhere along the way, of automatically standing a few centimetres apart when they were having their photograph taken (at private things, family things, on holidays, on trips), at opposite ends of a foursome with Martyn and Cornelia between them. He’s a master of the hover hand, positioned slightly above Dan’s shoulder. The wedding photos would have been _ridiculous_.

***

One of the things that he hadn’t expected about Youtube was quite how _involved_ people would get, how much they would care about him, kneeling on the floor of his dorm room in an array of different coloured plaid. The early days had just been trying to work out what people liked, what they wanted to see, how they wanted him to behave. The pieces of his persona that he should drop and the ones he should exaggerate. The parts that made up AmazingPhil, with wide eyes and big gestures, outstretched arms and a fringe that he had to peer out from under. Making videos is a lot of people reacting to you. And then sometimes you reacting to those people reacting to you. And them reacting to you reacting to them reacting to you. And onwards until infinity.

The AmazingPhil voice is up two octaves from his normal one. He’d never noticed. Dan’s the actor, not him, but it had been his mum who had said so (even though he’d never wanted her to watch the videos in the first place because he was meant to be doing a Masters and spending his time productively). He said _Muuuuuumm_ in a long dragged out way. _They’re not - I’ll tell you if there’s ones I want you to watch_.

She said _it’s fine, I like them. I like that cute voice you put on_.

He blinked _What voice?_

AmazingPhil sometimes felt like the good parts of his personality with none of the bad. He was sunny and sweet-natured, got excited by the smallest things and smiled with his eyes shut. It made sense that his voice would be higher, if he’d thought about it, but he hadn’t. The voice appeared, much like everything else, when he shrugged on the things that made him AmazingPhil, wearing the brightest clothes he owns and keeping the fringe even when he’d been wearing his hair brushed back in real life for months.

That was the other thing that he hadn’t expected about making videos: referring to your actual existence as _real life_. Your away from the camera life. What happened to you when you weren’t filming. Martyn sometimes jokes _if you don’t post it on Facebook did it even happen?_ about a cousin of theirs who gives hourly updates, but Phil wonders that too. If you don’t say it in a video is it even real? He used to find the endless posts analysing the way he moved his head (this way) or the way he’d said one word (like that) or his overall mood (does he seem sad?) funny. Until they suddenly weren’t anymore. 

The actual _you_ got lost in it all. Sometimes.

***

In the morning he finds Dan on the balcony, sweeping up melted snow and pieces of Christmas lights. He blinks at Phil, as though surprised that either of them are still actually here.

Phil says, “Are you cheating on me?” because he’s been thinking about nothing else for most of the night. He’s almost got a complete mental image of the person Dan is going to leave him for (an Evan Peters/Nick Jonas hybrid who liked all the same loud music Dan does and thought nothing of dropping £600 on a sweatshirt). 

Dan’s mouth falls open. “Seriously?”

“Yes, _seriously_. Are you?”

“No,” Dan says. “I would never. How could you think that?”

“I don’t know.” Phil pushes a piece of glass, bright gold and sparkling, with his foot. “It seems like a pretty logical thing to think, in the circumstances.”

Dan bows his head. Phil looks at the mass of curls presented to him and wonders what they’re even doing right now, the sheer ridiculousness of this situation. He’s pressed his mouth to those curls, twined each one around his fingers, skimmed his hand across the top of them. “I didn’t finish yesterday. With what I wanted to say. But, it’s - We should have talked about it before.”

Phil waits. Dan sweeps glass into a neat pile and then promptly messes it back up. He does it three times before Phil can’t stand to watch it anymore. “What do you want to say, Dan? I’ve been thinking about - Or, I haven’t actually been thinking, I don’t want to know what you mean. It’s going to be something bad. Like you don’t want to be with me anymore, or that you don’t want to be together, or -”

“We can’t get married,” Dan says. “We can’t even get engaged.”

“We’ve been together for nearly _ten years_ , what did you think -”

“We never talked about it! You hate the idea of it, you _said_ , you always -”

“I like the idea of it with you,” Phil says.

Dan finally stops moving glass around, lets the broom fall out of his hands and onto the floor. He says, “We’ve been together for ten years,” and brings his index fingers and thumbs together into a tiny circle. “Here. We haven’t - We’re not.” He opens the circle out, spreads his hands wide. “Out there.” 

Phil looks at the space between Dan’s fingertips where, he supposes, there should be a tiny Dan and Phil, looking horrified at the safety of their careful set-up being broken open, the entire roof being lifted off. “But we agreed about that. We talked about it.”

Dan looks to the sky. It’s dramatic but Dan is dramatic. There’s some element of the performing arts club that never quite left him (and Phil has always been the most supportive audience that he could have asked for, throwing never-ending bouquets onto a stage). 

Phil says, finally, what he should probably have said first of all, pulling every word from his resisting heart, because if that answer’s yes then he’s not sure what he’ll do. The thought alone is unbearable, there’s nothing left to throw off the roof. He’d break every Christmas light in London. “Are you breaking up with me? Is that what’s happening? Are we breaking up?”

(Breaking up is an odd phrase, like a snap happens down the centre of a couple, static on a tv screen, a thousand pixels on Skype, things Phil can’t see or hear through. A lightning bolt severing the part of him that is just for Dan, all the unseen gestures and mumbled words. _Stop, you’re breaking up_ ).

Dan says, “I’m not explaining this very well, which is stupid because I’ve been _wanting_ to explain it for ages. And we _did_ agree about it, you’re right, but that was years ago,” followed by, “No, don’t walk away, I’m still -”

Phil says, “I’m not walking away,” and realises that he’s walked back into the living room without even meaning to be. “ _You’re_ walking away.”

“It’s been ten years of just us, Phil. We edit _everything_ , we don’t even - you dm people who take photos with us in the background that could be taken the wrong way, you make me turn the location off my tweets so that no one guesses that we’re together at Christmas, even though everyone does, and all the things that you make me cut out, you - We changed that thing last week because you looked too _fond_ , do you remember, you said -”

“I always look fond,” Phil says. “I’m always looking at -”

“You want to get _married_. You proposed to me, here -”

“I didn’t propose. The proposing never actually began.”

“You _intended to propose_ but you freak out if you think someone might see us holding hands in public.”

“We don’t hold hands in public.”

“No,” Dan states, flatly. “We don’t.” 

“I don’t know what you’re trying to -”

“You’re always jumping to the end before you’ve finished the start. You’re always _rushing_ because you just want to skip the difficult parts and avoid anything that might mean us having to have a fight or a conversation -”

“We don’t have fights,” Phil interrupts, automatically, same cheerful answer he always gives to his parents over dinner, _oh, we never fight, we’re too similar, it’s important to talk to each other, Dan hates going to bed angry, it’s fine_.

“We’re having a fight right now.”

“This isn’t a fight.” Phil clenches his knuckles, tiny moon shaped indents onto his palms. “I don’t know what _this_ is. I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Only a small and very select group of people know we’re actually together,” Dan says, and Phil immediately thinks _that doesn’t answer the question_ even though he hadn’t asked a question at all. “Like, a _tiny_ number of people. Who were you even planning on inviting?”

“People _know_ , we’re not subtle. We were never -”

“So you’re relying on people working it out for themselves because you don’t want to go through the drama of actually saying it outloud.”

Phil knows that the Valentine’s video is going to be the next thing that gets brought up. It’s usually locked away, buried deep, it only gets uncovered if one of them wants to be particularly cruel to the other and that’s rare. Or it was rare. It took a long time for Valentine’s Day itself to stop making him anxious, or for the act of putting his feelings on display to feel natural. Had that last one even happened at all though. It took a lot, holding all the ways you loved someone out in your hands, listing them all in a presentation, and then accidentally sharing them with the world in a way that you couldn’t take back, that he could never take back. It still appears, he still gets helpful tweets from people telling him that it’s back out there ( _but I didn’t watch it though!! <3_) and that he should get it taken down.

He always does (get it taken down that is). He’s a pro at the strongly worded email. Though he always wants to apologise to his younger self, continually deleting something that he was so happy with, so proud of, just because too many people had seen it. The reality of it.

Phil says, “Don’t mention the video,” before Dan can. It’s easier if he does. Dan is incapable of talking about it without giving into frustration and upset. 

Dan frowns. “I wasn’t going to. But, that’s probably a point, I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to -”

“I’ll stay with Martyn,” Phil interrupts. “For a while. For as long as - I don’t know. As long as you need? How long do you need? I don’t know what an appropriate amount of time is for -” He has to stop because, appropriate time for what? For wanting to be together again? For wanting to get married? “I - It doesn’t feel right to be talking to you like this.”

Yesterday they’d gone to Covent Garden and then the Winter Wonderland, all of the ridiculously over-the-top Christmas things that Phil loves and Dan puts up with for his sake. Carol singers and snow and mulled wine combined with slow-moving London shoppers and pushy street performers. One of the latter (a gold-covered ballerina) had cornered Dan just outside the Opera House and had forced him to waltz with her while someone played In The Bleak Midwinter on an accordion. Dan’s a terrible dancer, as anyone who’s 80% leg would be, but he’d tried. He’d stepped on her gold painted feet twice and cackled his genuine unfiltered laugh, head thrown back and curls bouncing, and Phil (not for the first time) felt how much he loved him like it was a surprise, a thought that had just suddenly occurred to him. He had the ring in his pocket, had done for days, and thought _I’ll do it tomorrow, at home, where it’s just us_ but he would have done it then, would have thrown himself right onto the cobbles and said _marry me_ because he would never have been able to think of anything more eloquent than that. 

He wonders now if that was the reason, the wanting it to be _just us_ or was it the flipside, the undercurrent. _I’ll do it tomorrow, at home, when there’s no-one else around, where no-one can see_.

***

Martyn, predictably, wants to go around and “have a word” because he always turns into some kind of East End gangster when someone wrongs Phil. “Just a word,” he says, halfway through unfolding the sofa bed. “I - This is just - it makes no sense. It’s you and Dan.”

The sofa bed takes up the entirety of Martyn and Cornelia’s living room. Phil wonders if he is now forever destined to stay in spaces that he’s too big for. His suitcase sits forlornly on top of it, stil full of the light summer clothes he’d taken to Brazil and hadn’t unpacked yet. It now has a huge dent on its front, on account of Phil kicking it down the stairs between the two flats because Dan wouldn’t stop saying _no, I’ll leave_. It turns out that he actually _is_ prone to emotional outbursts. Who knew. 

_I’ll leave_ Dan said, from the upstairs flat, the proper flat, not the filming one. _I’ll go to my mum’s, or to a hotel_. Phil called it TheActualFlat, all one word, like they were arranging dates. I’ll meet you for dinner in TheActualFlat. Wait for me in TheActualFlat. Dan pressed a hand to his forehead. _You don’t have to be the one who leaves_.

Phil, downstairs, in the pretend flat, the fake one, said _It’ll make a change_ which was an unfair thing to say (Dan had never left, just been difficult to keep hold of sometimes). Dan flinched away from the words like they were physical blows. 

“I can stay in a hotel,” Phil tells Martyn, conscious of everything all at once (the bed, the suitcase, all six foot plus of him and the crushing weight of his heart). “I don’t want to be in the way.”

“You’re not,” Martyn says, side-stepping around the bed to try and get to the kitchen. “I promise. I just never thought - I didn’t think you’d be here like this. Because of this. I don’t think I’ve said your name without _and Dan_ after it for years.”

Phil hasn’t thought about himself without _and Dan_ in some variation for years either. He doesn’t know how it’s going to work. Any of it. 

“Maybe he’s just surprised,” Martyn offers, weakly. “Or he wasn’t expecting it. You could - do you still have the ring?”

“I threw it off the balcony,” Phil says. “I don’t know where it landed.”

Martyn’s eyes widen. “ _Right_ , I-”

“Then I smashed our Christmas lights.”

Martyn looks somewhere over Phil’s shoulder, like the real Phil is going to burst in and save him from this imposter. “That’s, uh, not like you.”

“None of this is _like me_.”

“What made you decide to do it tonight? He could have other stuff on his mind, or just, you know Dan. I mean, you know Dan. You know him. He might just not be in the -”

“I did it tonight because I wanted to do it yesterday.”

Martyn says, “That doesn’t make any sense,” and Phil can’t really argue with that.

***

Phil had thrown _it’ll make a change_ into Dan’s face (pieces of words, pieces of broken lights, pieces of his heart) and watched as Dan’s expression, predictably, caved in on itself. Sadness, rather like true happiness, makes his dimples appear, though they seem almost mocking without the smile to accompany them. Phil stared at the crescent moon in Dan’s cheek and said, “I love you,” and, “So much,” but it still sounded like he was launching the words at Dan, sending them flying up the stairs to TheActualFlat.

“I know,” Dan said, sounding stricken. Phil is only used to hearing that particular tone of voice from behind closed doors. “I know you do.”

“Then why -”

“You’re just scared to let anyone else know that.”

***

He wakes up, bleary-eyed and like he’s never been to sleep at all, completely cocooned in the duvet and on the right side of the sofa bed. Cornelia, in the doorway, stares at the left side (enough room for another person to get in, if they wanted to), and says, “Morning Phil.”

Phil says, “Cornelia,” to which she nods in agreement. “Thanks for letting me stay.”

“That’s no problem.” He must look particularly sad because she adds, “You know it’s no problem, you can stay as long as you like,” and then, “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“There’s nothing to _tell_ , it’s like it all went wrong in the space of two seconds and I don’t know why.”

Cornelia says, “You really don’t know?” in a more gently questioning way than a mean one. He supposes it’s surprising to people that there could be any aspect of Dan that he didn’t know. “He might just need a break, Phil, you’re together a lot, and you’ve just been on a tour, and -”

“You and Martyn are together a lot.”

“But we don’t have the added pressure of -” she stops short, gives him a very apologetic smile. “And I take a lot of walks.”

Phil isn’t really in the mood for diversions (and he’s usually the most head-buried-in-sand person he knows, pretending he hasn’t heard things to avoid any kind of tension). “Added pressure of what?” It’s not something you can say while firmly wrapped in a duvet so he releases himself and sits up. “Of _what_?”

“The, um, pretending,” Cornelia says, looking like she regrets every second of having stepped into the room. “I don’t know if pretending is the right word. The hiding, maybe. I don’t know, Phil, this isn’t - I shouldn’t have said -”

“I wasn’t pretending,” Phil says. “I never did.”

***

He has one text on his phone, from 3am, the time Dan is at his most productive. It says _i didn’t_ with no further explanation. Phil reads it ten times on the walk to Starbucks but the possibilities of what Dan didn’t do are too much for him to contemplate. He has too many lists in his head all at once, too many catalogues of Ways Dan Looked When I Left, Things Dan Said Last Week That I Should Have Paid Attention To, The Hundred Ways That I Misjudged The Situation Even Though I Thought I Understood It Perfectly Well. They sound like video titles, a zoom in on him sitting on the AmazingPhil Bed in a different room. Waving as he says _Hey guys, you won’t belieeeevvveeee what happened_. He keeps turning to his left, like Dan should be there. Dan is not.

There’s a small cluster of fans at the entrance to Starbucks (they look to his left too, and then back at him. No one says _Where’s Dan_ but they’re thinking it. Phil knows because he’s thinking it too). He poses for photos, asks gentle questions about A-Levels and coos at a picture of one girl’s dog. Leaves all the conversations pauses where Dan usually fills in, takes a terrible selfie because he can never get the angle quite right when there’s a big group (when he looks at it to add a filter he’s taken aback by the sadness on his face and instantly deletes it, chirps _let’s take another one!_ )

There’ll be a Twitter thread, probably. Everyone gets worried when they’re apart.

He sends _what do you mean, you didn’t?_

The coffee is too sweet, the crowd by the entrance seems to be increasing and he feels, somehow, like his body is here (sat with his knees crammed under a too small table) but his mind is back at Manchester train station and Dan hasn’t shown up. 

The three little dots appear and disappear. Phil repeats _you didn’t what?_

The plan, if Dan hadn’t appeared for some reason, even after the numerous photos of his train tickets, had been to go back home, pretend nothing of importance had been lost and quietly delete all of his social media. He wouldn’t have messaged to find out what had happened, or questioned anything. The inevitability of it wouldn’t have surprised him at all. His anxiety has always raised itself differently to Dan’s; Dan shouts into the void and worries about his own existence, Phil just always assumes that the worst is going to happen. Waiting for heartbreak should, technically, make it easier when it happens. So convinced that something will be wrong that he almost makes it so. A confirmation of a fact: obviously he wasn’t going to turn up, why would he, have you _seen_ him? Obviously he wasn’t going to say yes, why did you think he would? 

One of the baristas appears at his side and says, “I’ll just clean this away.”

Phil says, “What?” and realises that he’s spilt his coffee everywhere. “Sorry.” He tries to help her tidy up and succeeds only in sending his cup smashing to the floor. He says, “Sorry, I keep doing that.”

She looks confused. “What, breaking things?”

“I suppose so.”

_you didn’t what?_

***

The Things Dan Said Last Week That I Should Have Paid Attention To list grows ever bigger. Phil can’t keep track of it within the many hidden sections of his mind. They’d gone to Covent Garden. Before that they’d watched the new Avengers trailer and Dan had wished that he was floating around space with gradually decreasing oxygen too but he said _except you would be there, obviously_ so that couldn’t be a thing he’d missed. Dan did that a lot, wished himself into far away places and then immediately clarified that Phil would be there too. _So we can lose oxygen together? Thanks_.

It was one of the smaller things he’d picked up from therapy, Phil can’t remember the exact name of the exercise but it’s around reminding the people that are important to you that they are, in fact, one of the most special things in your life. Dan took it very seriously, spent a week texting his brother every evening to tell him he appreciated him, or apologising for something he’d said to his mother when he was sixteen. Dan remembers every misplaced word that has ever come out of his mouth. 

Phil, being the most important person, gets it the most. When he gets up in the morning (I love when your hair looks like that), when they’re having breakfast (I don’t love that you’ve eaten all my cereal again but I love you), when they’re getting ready to go out (I love how that coat looks on you). 

(I love when you wear blue. I wish you wore those jeans more. I love how patient you are. It’s cute that you spend so long trying to get those pigeons to eat from your hand. I mean, I disapprove because they’re flying rats and carry, like, a hundred diseases, but I think _you’re_ cute. I’ll still love you if you get pigeon rabies. I love when you wear red. I thought it was cute when you said that, there, look, press pause, you can see that I want to - nevermind. I love how peaceful you make me feel. That’s an impossible task, you know that. Sometimes. I love when you wear grey. You can tell, look. You’re going to have to edit that out). 

Things Dan Said That Are True. _We edit everything_. Everything. Their actual lives. Phil sees people fantasising about some kind of blooper reel where everything they cut out is kept, but it’s not true. It just gets deleted. There’s not a hard-drive in the world that would be able to contain the amount of you looked too fond there or it’s obvious that we’ve just been or fuck, we can’t leave that in look at you, that results from their videos. Phil wants all of those clips back suddenly, very badly. Wishes that someone would have have said no, slow down, you’ll want to keep those, when that someone should have been him. 

Dan had also said _you’re relying on people working it out for themselves because you don’t want to go through the drama of actually saying it outloud_ which was true. Rushing to the end by skipping the middle. Phil is someone who turns away from awkward interactions even if they don’t involve him, can’t stand watching two strangers have any kind of argument. He’s not that type of person. Is AmazingPhil that type of person? 

He messages Dan to say _We shouldn’t have deleted_ and can’t think of a specific enough occasion to choose. We shouldn’t have deleted anything. The message goes as it is, missing its final few words, and he thinks, right, stop texting him, which is what Martyn had said when he left the flat.

“I heard you were looking sad in a Starbucks,” Martyn says, as if summoned. 

“Are you searching my mentions on Twitter?”

“Always.” Martyn sits. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking,” Phil searches, lands on the first thing that reveals itself, “Of that video of you and Cornelia in the snow globe.”

Martyn looks so surprised that he half-laughs. “Of - at the shop? The one she put on Instagram? Why?”

“Dan wanted to have a video in there too.”

“You did.” Martyn frowns. “Didn’t you?”

“No, I mean -”

“Oh. You mean, like us. Not -”

“Not at opposite ends of cardboard cutouts of ourselves, no.”

“Phil,” Martyn says, slowly. “You - You know it’s like that. It’s always been like that. You’re both really careful about, you know.” His tone turns apologetic. “Showing too much. Is that the right way to say it. I don’t know. We don’t talk about it much, do we? Do you think we should?”

“I think,” Phil says, “That I let it go on for too long because it was the easiest way.”

“You can’t always pick the easiest way,” Martyn replies.

***

Dan replies to say _we shouldn’t have deleted 3:00-3:45 in the second undertale video do you remember that_

Phil does not. 

_or 11:00-11:08 in the first golf with friends_

_the whole other version of you trying on outfits_

_the other mukbang you know what i mean_

Phil very much does. He says _Can I phone you?_ when he means _Can I come home?_ , to which Dan’s face suddenly fills his phone screen (it’s not a particularly good photo of him, Phil hadn’t wanted to pick a really nice one, one that he loved, in case it was accidentally revealed by someone zooming in on a screenshot. Sometimes he thinks their fans could work for the FBI).

Phil answers with, “Dan!” with such longing and pleading that he wants to hang up and start again. 

Dan sounds startled. “Phil.”

“I didn’t mean to ask if I could phone you.”

“You didn’t want me to?”

“No, no, I meant to say - I meant lots of things, I suppose.”

“You could try saying those things out loud.”

Phil says, “I’m in Starbucks.”

“Right, so you don’t want someone to hear you. Is that why you’re whispering?”

“No,” but possibly yes. “No, I’ve been - I’ve been here for about four hours. Martyn was here but he left. I’ve drunk a lot of coffee but also spilled most of it.”

“You can leave,” Dan says, obviously trying to repress the fondness in his voice. “You don’t have to keep sitting there filling yourself with caffeine. Drink some water.”

“I can’t leave. Where would I go? You’re not anywhere.” 

“I’m here. I’m literally exactly where you left me.”

“On the stairs to TheActualFlat?”

“Actually yes. I sat here a while ago and haven’t really gotten up yet -”

“You’ve eaten something though, right? You haven’t -”

“I’m not taking dietary advice from someone who’s spent hours in Starbucks.”

“I’ve spent hours in Starbucks because I wanted to see you but was too scared to ask.” 

“You shouldn’t be too scared to ask me for anything. That’s the point.”

“I feel,” Phil sits further forwards, cups his hand around the phone, “Like I’ve been doing everything wrong for years and you never told me.”

“I don’t think anyone was doing anything _wrong_.”

“Why are you using past tense?”

“I don’t know,” Dan says. And, for emphasis, “I don’t know.”

“If I could change it I would.”

There’s a long pause, so long that he thinks Dan has hung up or that they’ve lost signal ( _come back, you’re breaking up_ ), and he’s almost about to say so, when Dan sighs, right into his ear. “Would you?”

It’s not entirely fair. Phil can feel himself about to bring up The Video, Dan’s reaction to it, the fact that Dan had never actually watched it in the way it was intended, was defensive about it from the start and so focused on saying it was a joke that it was almost made so. Phil had never treated it as a joke and had never agreed with any of Dan’s rants to prove that it was. Because it wasn’t. Some of Dan’s posts had been so convincing that Phil sometimes wondered if he believed them. But The Video is off limits, when perhaps it never should have been. Maybe they should have had more arguments. Maybe he should have said how much he hated that stupid blog Dan put up. _You know I don’t mean it_ Dan said. _You know I don’t_.

“That’s not fair,” Phil says. “That’s a really - You know I would.”

“I’m - I know it wasn’t, I’m sorry, I’m just - I’m telling you that you shouldn’t be scared to tell me things when I’m literally scared of everything all the time.”

“No, you’re not, you’re the bravest -”

“Nope,” Dan says. “You have no idea how many times I’ve been like, we’ll have the conversation now, I’ll start it, I’ve rehearsed it, and I just, don’t do it. And we carry on, but maybe just push the line a bit further all the time when really we needed to jump over it.”

“Stop using past tense.” Phil realises that he’s now almost completely hunched over the table, whispering into the cradle of his hand. “And how would you have started it? What would you have said?”

“I would have said, hey, Phil, we love each other, I’d quite like to take photos where you have your arm around me and also to hold your hand in public, I wouldn’t mind being able to call you my boyfriend to people outside of our families or sometimes to people in our families. I don’t want to tone down my expressions around you even though the toned down versions are still pretty obvious. I would have said that we can’t just rely on things being obvious. And in my head you would say yes, Dan, of course, and, I don’t know what we would have done then because I know that’s not what you would say. You’d say, no, we should wait or, no, I like things as they are -”

Phil says, “No, I wouldn’t,” but it’s like his voice knows it’s a lie. It comes out too muffled for anyone to hear.

“And then you would propose,” Dan finishes. “You would _propose_ when we hadn’t talked about any of the things that we should have done.”

“Stop. I get it.”

“I didn’t mean that to sound like it’s all on you. It’s not. It wasn’t.”

“Have we broken up?” Phil says. “Just to like - Have we?”

“I think that we could have just -”

Phil says, shouts, yells, too loud in a now nearly empty coffee shop, too near to the phone, “Stop using past tense. Just stop. Why are you talking like that?” 

“Because I don’t know if _we’re_ past tense.”

“Of course we’re not, we never would be.”

“It’s not like we’re _present_ very much though, is it?”

Phil feels that one, right in his heart (it can’t take much more, it must be like one of those little bundles of twine that his mother loves, fashioned to look like something else. A collection of splinters pretending to be a heart). “I don’t want to do this over the phone,” he says. They’ve done far too much via videos, Skype, text messages, emails, dms, and far too little in real life. “I’m coming home.”

***

The reality is, in whatever half-reality that they’ve carefully constructed around themselves over the past few years, that Phil had actually come to enjoy the security of it. The safety. He is not a jealous person but Dan, somehow, makes him close to one. He gets protective, like he could be a barrier between Dan and the world (which sometimes, most of the time, makes Dan anxious and existential). Phil has never met anyone like Dan, in so many ways, but he especially has never met anyone so worried by their own significance, their legacy, their reason for existing. Dan worries about videos, about decisions, about tours because _what if it’s wrong? What if it goes wrong?_ but drags out meet and greets until he’s met every person in the room. Even ones that don’t want to meet him. He hates attention and craves it at the same time. Hates being looked at but loves the spotlight.

Phil loves every contradicting thing that Dan is and all that he’d ever wanted to do was to create a place where he would be happy and comfortable. If that had meant carefully observing every gesture, choosing words and tones, then so be it, it would a price to pay for Dan’s happiness. Then maybe it became a little about _his_ happiness too. Phil is, at heart, still an editor, still cutting away scenes or restructuring them into something different. And he is, still, someone who hates to take risks and has to always be in control. 

All of those things turned into the two of them on a very small planet of their own, with a tiny circle of visitors who never overstayed their welcome. And Phil had skipped to the end without dealing with the middle, had thrown himself and Dan into orbit without any kind of warning sign, floating into space with gradually decreasing oxygen.

“Except,” Dan had said, Things Dan Said That I Should Have Paid Attention To. “You would be there too, obviously. It’s not like I’d go anywhere without you.”

“So we can lose oxygen together?” Phil replied, jokingly but also while touching the pad of his thumb to Dan’s dimple (the left one) so he knew he wasn’t serious. “Thanks. Why are you always wishing yourself off everywhere?”

“I’m always wishing myself everywhere with you,” Dan clarified. “You need to listen more.”

***

Dan is still perched between TheActualFlat and TheOtherFlat, TheFakeFlat, TheFilmingFlat, TheFlatThatShouldNeverHaveBeen; right on the centre of the stairs., like he’d frozen in time the moment Phil closed the door, waiting to spring back to life as soon as he returns. He doesn’t really _spring_ though, more stands up very slowly and gives Phil a searching look (he hasn’t slept. Phil can tell. The shadows under his eyes have shadows of their own).

“I haven’t been listening to you,” Phil says. 

“That’s fair. I’ve been speaking in metaphors, most of the time.”

“But not all of the time.” Dan is about to say something else, something that might throw Phil off the speech he’s been preparing, so he panics and blurts out, “I was going to propose to you in Covent Garden. When you were dancing. I wanted to do it then. Because - I love you but sometimes I’m just really aware of how much, you know, like it’s a physical thing that I could show to you and - that’s what I felt then. I should have done it then but I didn’t. Because people were around and someone might take a photo or a video or - it shouldn’t matter, any of that. _You_ matter. We matter. I love you. I should be telling everyone. I did it here because I knew no one would see. That’s - I thought it was easier that way. I was getting ahead of myself.”

He’s somehow back at Dan’s feet, on the bottom stair while Dan is several steps above him. Dan tilts his head to one side and says, “I meant what I said earlier, it’s not all on you, it’s not like I was shouting it from the rooftops or anything.”

“But that’s the thing, I think we’ve both been shouting it, this entire time, and, like, kidding ourselves into thinking we were being really secretive, when we weren’t at all. I think I thought everyone would be shocked and we’d break the internet or something and tumblr would crash but - I think everyone would just go _finally_.” 

“You don’t have to say these things to make me happy.”

“I’d do anything to -”

“I mean, don’t say things you don’t mean because you think they’re what I want to hear.”

“I’ve never done that,” Phil says. “Not to you.” He takes a step up, so he’s almost level with Dan’s chin. “I hate being apart from you. I’ve spent the whole time having a conversation with you in my head, I kept thinking that you were there and that I could point things out to you and that you’d laugh and I leave spaces for you to speak, like, that’s -”

“I’m sorry. For reacting the way I did and for not saying anything and for just - I wrote you a whole list of things that I wanted to tell you because, we had our first fight and we went to bed angry and you shouldn’t -”

“Forget that part happened,” Phil says, up one more step. “We can come back to that later.”

“You threw the ring off the balcony,” Dan points out, almost impressed.

“I’ll get you another one. In, like, years in the future. You would have liked that one but I’ll get a better one.”

“No,” Dan says. “I found it.”

Phil is halfway through taking another step, which he abruptly misses, two seconds of utter panic as he flails in mid-air before regaining his balance. “What?”

“I went to get it. I didn’t like - I didn’t want it to be lost.”

“How long did that take you?”

Dan hums a little _um_ sound which, for Dan, means _I’d rather not say_. It’s the sound he usually makes when Phil asks how long he’s been playing Guild Wars. “You threw it pretty far, for someone who hates sports. I didn’t know where you were keeping it so I just put it in your sock drawer. I didn’t look at it. I can see it again, some time.”

“I can’t believe you looked for it.”

“ _I_ can’t believe you want to marry me.”

“I want everything with you,” Phil says. “Just, maybe, in the right order.”

Dan says, “You,” and whatever he was going to say next is lost against Phil’s shoulder as he finally, _finally_ makes it onto the same step. “You,” against his neck, his cheek, almost to his mouth. “Don’t do that again. We’ve had a fight now, let’s never have another one.”

“I don’t know how feasible that is.” Dan manages to press a kiss against his eyebrow, the only thing he can really reach as Phil is leaning away. “Wait - say what you were going to say. What you were rehearsing. Say it now.”

Dan sighs, right into Phil’s hair. “Hey, Phil, we love each other. I love you so much that I slept in the Amazing Phil room last night because the duvet kind of smells like your aftershave. I love you so much that it used to scare me, like I thought you’d leave if it got too much, I know you’re not great with that and I’m a lot. And then it didn’t scare me but I thought it scared you. I didn’t react to the video like I should have, and I know that now. I’d like to take photos where you have your arm around me and to hold your hand in public, and to call you my boyfriend to everyone, even if they’re just random people in the street. I won’t tone down my expressions around you because I literally never did that anyway. I love you. It shouldn’t really be more complicated than that but we - we kind of managed to make it so, I guess.” He skates his fingertips up Phil’s side. “And then you say.”

Phil says, “Yes.”

Dan huffs. “Yes to what?”

“All of it. Everything. We’ll - I need to make a plan or to write something -” Dan laughs, delighted, says _of course you do_ , “No, I need to be organised, there has to be a - We can just finish a few things, we can make it the last pinof, the last versus, the last -I’m never going to film in that room again - I don’t mean to, like, delete the channels or anything, or to make a big announcement, but we could finish some things and - ”

“Start in the middle?” Dan says.

“Start where we should have started.” Phil sighs, with relief, with ten years worth of relief suddenly being released. “Come home with me for Christmas.”

“I was doing that anyway.”

“And tell people that you are. Shout it from all the rooftops. Not this one though, you’ll scare the pigeons.”

Dan’s genuine laugh is a wonderful thing that had surprised Phil when he first heard it (it’s beautifully un self-conscious, for someone who is conscious of _everything_ ). Somewhere between a cackle and a squawk, accompanied usually by him hitting his hand against the nearest surface. He can’t do that now as both his hands are fisted in the fabric of Phil’s t-shirt, so he just lightly thumps his forehead against Phil’s shoulder. “The rooftops were metaphorical. I meant I’ll shout it from social media. In lowercase.”

“You don’t have to shout. I mean, we don’t have to shout. We can just be really really unsubtle.”

“Then I’ll be really really unsubtle from the rooftops,” Dan agrees.

***

It all gets too much after that, a combination of being apart (even if was just a day, they’ve always felt time away more intensely, hugging in doorways while someone, usually Martyn, says _you just saw each other yesterday_) and the utter giddiness of feeling like they’ve taken a step somewhere. Maybe not off the planet for two yet, but not quite floating in space either. Phil mumbles _come here_ even though Dan is already there, couldn’t be closer if he tried. _Come here_.

He slams shut the door to TheAmazingPhil Room and then pushes Dan against the wall beside it. “We’re never opening that door again. I’m never filming in there again.”

Dan says, “Nope,” a murmur against the skin underneath Phil’s ear, then his jaw. “Never again. We can burn that duvet.”

“But the memories,” Phil replies, finding it very hard to formulate thoughts and turn them into words. “The - It smells like you, like me, that really sweet aftershave you used to wear, you wore it when you first visited, you remember - I said, it’s just me, because you looked so -”

“In love with you. That’s how I looked. That’s how I always look.”

The AmazingPhil Room door remains closed.

***

Dan, trying to fit himself under overhead lockers on a plane that has _propellers_ , the type of plane that should be involved in the first two man flight over the sea, says, “Take a photo.”

He’s already taken, by Phil’s estimation, three photos of the plane for his Instagram stories and posted on Twitter. Phil hasn’t been in any of them yet but he thinks that his smile might crack everyone’s phone screens through the sheer brightness of it. He doesn’t know how Dan is looking at him without shading his eyes. 

Dan manages to press the top of his head against the ceiling, folded over at the waist. “Phil.”

“I’m making this your photo on my phone by the way.”

“That’s fine,” Dan says. “You can always remember me this way. Take a few, I want to put another one on my stories.”

Phil holds the phone up to a Dan-approved photo angle. “You didn’t post this much when we spent months flying around the world. It’s only the Isle of Man.”

Dan pauses mid-pose. “Why? Is it unsubtle?”

“It’s the most unsubtle,” Phil replies. 

Dan smiles. “Good.”


End file.
